Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

wrote William Shakespeare in Sonnet 18.

Oak before ash in for a splash;Ash before oak in for a soak.

This weather rhyme proved to be correct last year (2012). The ash leaves appeared first and after a very dry start to the year, it hardly stopped raining all summer, autumn and winter.

We hadn’t had the wet weather we expect in February, which has the nicknameFebruary fill dyke.A dyke in this context is a ditch.

Summerish January, winterish springis another weather saying, which perhaps applied more to this year. I’m not sure whether it was January or February when I went for a walk on a mild day and chanced to met a friend who remarked,It’s aborrowed day. When I looked puzzled she explained it wasborrowed from April.

April showers bring May flowers.We are half way through April and it only began to rain towards the end of the second week.

Spring forward, fall back helps us remember which way to change the clocks for daylight saving as it is called in some places. This year the clocks changed in North America three weeks ahead of us in Britain.

Blackthorn winter is a term I read about as a child. For the last twenty-five years I have lived close to a hedge with hawthorn and blackthorn growing in it. Each year when the blackthorn is in flower (about a month before the hawthorn) there has been a cold spell.

Spring fever is perhaps what makes us want to spring-clean! A few weeks ago I started spring-cleaning (I never finish!) and also began to spring-clean the early posts on this blog.

Spring in the air is an alternative toNice day! Terrible joke coming up…

Two people met in the countryside. The first one said, “Spring in the air!” and the second one did.

Under a cloud means out of favour or discredited (The Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Snowed under describes someone with a backlog of work to do. I imagine piles of paper in an old-fashioned office.

Get wind of something means hear a rumour about it.

Frozen stiff is often used to describe how a person feels. If washing is hung out to dry in cold weather it really can be frozen stiff!

Like greased lightning might describe how quickly fatty food travels through the gut.